In 2007, the local council of Salford (near Manchester) stepped in with £2 million in annual funding for the radio orchestra, then facing cuts from the BBC. Now it’s the local authorities who are strapped for cash …

“When Amazon ventures into the physical world — whether with in-store delivery lockers or grocery trucks or vending machines — the company’s sheer scale and ambition demand that you think in terms of world domination.”

Yes, sometimes Lena Dunham is nude to be amusing – but “the nudity on Girls often serves another valuable function that is neither funny nor sexy, in that it illustrates the intimacy between the show’s characters.”

“At bottom the hackneyed, infantile writing of Twombly underscores a terrible solipsism, a real, modern solipsism that is romanticized in a way that embodies the toxicity of modern life, and there’s nothing soft or clean or pleasurable about it at all.”

The medievalist who compressed Beowulf into 100 tweets says it “forced me back to the Old English to try and capture, in the shortest possible length, what I thought were the essential components of the poem.”

“Mr. Hess’s attempts to find his birth mother were unsuccessful — he made three trips back to the convent, where he was told by the nuns that they had no records about Ms. Lee and they had no idea how to find her — he did opt to be buried in Roscrea, in the hopes that Philomena would one day find him.”

“Roger Ebert has been gone for nine months and doesn’t appear to have slowed down much. … The looming question is how far the legacy of someone even as popular as Roger Ebert can be extended posthumously.”

“Laura Kaminsky increased the space’s new music programming significantly, helping to make it competitive with the Miller Theater at Columbia University, which had a long tradition of new-music presentation, as well as with relative upstarts like Le Poisson Rouge, which opened in 2008 and has become an important space for independent classical music, rock and jazz.”

“Gibney Dance has seven studios stretching over 15,000 square feet that it rents out to dance companies, Broadway shows or anyone in need of arts-related space. By adding the downtown facility, Gibney Dance will more than double its operations—and it’s not just empire-building.”

NT Live is a “fantastic thing” in allowing people to access shows they might not be able to otherwise see and the screenings are cheaper than a trip to London to see a play. “But it is not the same experience as being in the theatre.”

“Fine dramatic architecture does not require transferability to the screen. A camera does not shed a scorching light on the “bald spots” of theatrical writing. The two media are fundamentally different.”

Bounden “asks two players to dance together, each holding onto the ends of an smart phone and twisting their bodies to make the cursor hit a series of intended bullseyes.” Choreographers from the Dutch National Ballet collaborated on the game’s design.